Simona Halep won the Rogers Cup Sunday at Jarry Park.
Update: The men’s event, in Toronto this year, offers more than twice the prize money as the women’s.
Updates from August, 2018 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
As the anniversary of Daisy Sweeney’s death is marked, the city is saying it won’t be renaming Guy-Paxton Park for the music teacher, but it’s not clear what they will be doing.
One thing’s for sure, now that the little park has been sneered at and called “a dog run” it will be impossible to name it permanently as an honour to anybody. And it’s actually quite nice.
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Kate
Apparently bidding wars are a new phase in Montreal’s real estate scene.
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Kate
The Centre d’histoire continues with historical anniversaries of the week.
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Kate
Quebec has decided not to try to defend the niqab ban that was originally part of its bill 10 law on religious neutrality but was struck down in June by a Superior Court judge.
I still have not seen numbers indicating how prevalent the face veil is in Quebec. I just spotted these sample numbers in a tweet – I don’t know how reliable – on what proportion of several populations wears the full veil:
France: 0.0006%
Netherlands: 0.003%
UK: no available numbers but believed to be under 300 or 0.0002%Notice that the UK, where it’s also a hot potato issue, has no available numbers. We should always be wary of laws being passed on ideological grounds with no actual studies, facts or statistics to back them up. If a minuscule proportion of your population is wearing the veil, the only purpose of such a law would be to assuage the xenophobia of people who have very likely never even seen one.
One strand of thought in Quebec is prone to want to follow suit with France even if the background situation here is not the same, and France has the longest standing ban on the full face veil in public. This BBC survey from May on laws in various European countries (this isn’t an issue governed by the EU as a whole, it seems) says the French ban has been in force since 2011; Denmark, often hailed as one of the enlightened Nordic countries, passed a niqab ban earlier this month.
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Kate
The Globe & Mail’s Everett-Green dissects the Montreal festival scene, calling it too fractured but admitting that it hasn’t worked well to force festivals to merge.
Everett-Green doesn’t mention it directly, but one reason Serge Losique’s festival is in such bad financial shape dates from the incident he does describe in 2004, when Quebec withdrew funding from the World Film Fest and ordained a brand new festival to be directed by some European guy that was parachuted in. The idea was their new festival would merge with Claude Chamberlan’s Festival du nouveau cinéma and everything would be great. Except the new festival was a bomb and Chamberlan’s crowd wisely kept their distance.
But basically, Quebec has denied Losique the funding it would have given any other festival of its age and track record in an attempt to kill it off, so it’s no surprise Losique has ended up in the red. Other people might have given up long ago.
Everett-Green notices that festivals are often run by one driven personality, not a factor that can be replaced by money and bureaucracy no matter how much they throw at it. My bet is that the World Film Fest will live so long as Serge Losique does.
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Kate
A man was stabbed in a Verdun apartment Friday evening. He was, in the timeless phrase, known to police.
A man was stabbed in NDG Saturday afternoon. The perpetrator fled the scene on Sherbrooke West but police arrested two suspects later.
Around the same time in Lachine man was shot and two suspects were arrested.
So far, nobody has died this weekend.
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